Ken Burns on Story

May 16, ’12 7:28 PM

In this short film by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, Ken Burns shares his thoughtful perspective on what makes a good story.

Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War and then he decides he’s got enough time to go to the theatre. That’s a good story. When Thomas Jefferson said “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, he owned a hundred human beings and never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction, and more importantly never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. That’s a good story.

Over at the Atlantic, Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg has an interview with the filmmakers.

Comments (1)

Raw Milk Vending Machine

May 9, ’12 7:22 PM

Ahh, Slovenia. Land of surprise and delight. Here, Zhenya demonstrates a fresh raw milk vending machine. One euro a liter!

Comments (1)

Photographer Eric Valli. I love the color quality of these photos. They remind me of the glossy pages of old National Geographics. Click through some of the other stories on his page, I liked Honey Hunters too.

Comments (0)

Theremin Busker in Ljubljana

May 3, ’12 12:58 PM

Zhenya, Ana and I heard the strange music while standing on the triple bridge. At first I thought it was a saw player but as we got closer it was clear that the man was playing a homemade Theremin. His set-up included a PA system, mini disk player, CD player, all hacked into a homemade case and powered by a small gas generator 20 feet away and behind a sound baffle. Wonderful!

UPDATE:

Just a few hours after posting the video on YouTube someone called copperleaves made this very informative comment:

The busker is Romanian thereminist, Benedict Popescu. Other videos of this very unusual musician playing his even more unusual theremin can be found here on YouTube.

Comments (4)

Roadtrip Tuscany

Apr 23, ’12 1:34 PM

Comments (2)

Time Flies

Apr 22, ’12 1:26 PM

Like tossed bananas in the skies,
The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
Then’s the time to time the time flies
Like the time flies like an arrow. -Edison B. Schroeder 1966

Tempus fugit

The assignment was to show up to class and be unrecognizable. I took these photos quickly during a break, so some of us are out of character and others are very much in. It has only been a week since we put our costumes away and finished the focused character work but it feels like forever ago.

Comments (1)

Quick Snaps

Apr 18, ’12 6:16 PM

For a few weeks now I’ve been enjoying taking photos with my iPod. I use two pieces of software to make taking them more fun. Photosynth stitches photos together to create extreme wide angle collages. If you move the camera too much when you capture one of these panoramas the software struggles to put the image together just right and the results are sometimes surprising. I’ve been playing with Instagram too, that’s the photo sharing web-service that Facebook just bought for a billion dollars.

I added a feed to these photos I’m making to the column on the right.

Kottke.org had a post of intelligent comments on the closed economies that websites like Facebook and Instagram strive to create, he likens them to company towns:

Like all good producers, the workers are also consumers. They immediately spend their entire wage, and their wages is only good in Instagram-town. What they buy is the likes and comments of the photos they produce (what? You think it’s free? Of course it’s not free, it feels good so you have to pay for it. And you did, by being a producer), and access to the public spaces of Instagram-town to communicate with other consumers. It’s not the first time that factory workers have been housed in factory homes and spent their money in factory stores.

I may have sold out to these big companies by giving them real estate on this little site, cross linking, posing photos I’ve taken to them and all that, but damn it, they make it so compelling.